Interview with David Sønstebø

The Momentum around IOTA

People see “Bitcoin” and they tend to stop reading. Bitcoin is the result of devil worshippers. A technology used for drugs, weapons and the dark lord himself, who is just waiting for a chance to burn humanity and to butcher puppies, right?

No. Most people working with Bitcoin know these common preconceptions but they keep on working with it nonetheless. Because they know that the blockchain, a technology behind this decentralized payment system is part of our future.

For nine years now, hundreds of blockchains evolved in different directions, some were faster, some guaranteed pseudonymous or anonymous transactions and some evolved in the direction of the Internet of Things. The number of applications is countless.

When Bitcoin was created, people didn’t think about the needs of a growing machine-economy, though. The need for a security layer for billions of devices and the “interoperability”.
Instead, they were trying to create Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision, an ever repeating trial and error cycle with lots of highs and lows.
The parallel, subtle internetting of the world wasn’t part of that vision, a vision which aimed for a decentralized currency to replace fiat money like Dollar, Yuan or Euro.
The best argument was that money transactions are expensive and that working people pay the big players of earth. To put it simple: The fight for financial equality. An additional incentive to advertise Bitcoin was and is wealth because you’d make a hell of an ROI out of it. Sinner!

Well, the experiment worked partly but two things are still missing until today: mass adoption and the technical feature to solve the problems of the interconnectedness of the Internet.

Some people realized that we need something else for this new sphere. Bitcoins mission was not to solve these problems, but solving social economic issues.Technical hurdles like usability, like speed limitations or quantum resistance, weren’t part of that plan.

We needed a technological knack, to overcome the bottleneck of transactions fees, to overcome speed limitations like a block size or the lack of scalability which would limit the capability of the IoT.

Bitcoin, for example, has gotten so popular, its data streams were so big, it created “transaction-traffic-jams” so to speak. This is still an unsolved scalability problem.

Eventually, some experts gathered and concluded: Bitcoin is not the technology to solve these problems. The interoperability of the IoT needs a standard protocol for everyone.

So IOTA was created. A distantly related cousin of the first blockchain technology. Without blocks, even without a blockchain. IOTA has zero transaction fees and certainly no “transaction-traffic-jams”.

Where Bitcoin is quarreling with too many transactions, IOTA is flourishing, because the more nodes and transactions are within the “Tangle”, the faster IOTA gets. The Tangle is the distributed ledger, which is comparable to a blockchain but based on a directed acyclic graph. The scalability of the Tangle is theoretically infinite. Infinite!

Gartner told us that we already have 6.4 billion devices in the IoT and estimates 50 billion devices by 2020. Unsecured, they pose a big threat, because hackers could take control and set up huge botnets to perform DDoS-attacks.

Luckily, IOTA creates a protected environment and tamper proof data, which relies on algorithms and synchronicity. Therefore the IoT would be less vulnerable or better: impossible to hack from a software perspective once the Tangle is big enough.

The first reason people talk about IOTA, therefore, is the technical basis, which is far more advanced and aligned with the needs of the Internet of Things than Bitcoin ever could be.

“Cryptoland” as I like to call it, is more or less a closed incestuous playground for cryptocurrency experts. Some experts change the team very often and some create more than one currency.
Sometimes we, the inhabitants, hear big news about the latest newcomer currency.
And very often we see the same simple-minded tricks to make a few dollars.

“HillbillyCoin collaborates with Firecracker and Rockets Illinois inc“. “You heard about it? Rockets will be connected with HillbillyCoin!” “NASA is working with HillbillyCoin! MOON!”

That’s the common pump and dump of an unimportant technology without innovation or place in the real world. A shark basin to make a fast coin while others then sit on worthless assets.

Rarely we hear about real-world adoption, real industry or fintech-expert additions and if, we stay on alert because it could be an insignificant p&d attempt.

Most of all external investments are coming through the big assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Investments may sound significantly important, external experts, however, give credibility. One key ingredient of success.

The best strategy to create credibility should be, therefore, acquiring experts and preventing an asset from early hyping or support p&d.

It’s not about pumping and making a fast RoI, it’s about establishing a technology as a global standard, with leading experts in the field.
When the technology is ready.

The Founders, which are highly capable themselves, excluded, the IOTA foundation consists of 7 highly professional, educated, real-world experts.
No thimblerigs, no cryptoland-thugs but extern, real world scientists, and entrepreneurs. These people make the difference in cryptoland: hundreds of connections to companies outside of this island.

That’s the second reason, people believe in it: credibility.The community has been told not to unnecessarily hype IOTA, while the strategic management was acquiring a solid ground on what can and will be built on.

Since I know IOTA and its community I was always intrigued by the characters who defended it, although IOTA was attacked every single day.
The vision, the roadmap, an outstanding plan, just waiting to be executed was always in the minds of their creators from the beginning.

It’s just part of the story that new emerging projects in this sphere are confronted with all kind of allegations. Mostly justified by greed or financial intentions or just because some emotions went too far.

The roadmap I’m talking about contains enough futuristic stuff to look for flaws, but also enough facts and evidence that it’s not only futuristic but the logical consequence of hard work and dedication, the devs and supporters inherit.

I already mentioned JINN in one of my last articles: a ternary processor to conduct thousands of transactions a second.

This ternary system is new and obviously too much to be understood if you are just looking for a fast investment. Instead, it’s so disruptive, that most of the bypassers just treat it like a fraudulent fairy tale. Too good to be true. And if not?

Considering the already known credibility of the project, it would be a big mistake to ignore this part of IOTA.

That’s no magic, just the essence of skill and dedication, that IOTA’s team brings with them.

The third reason people talk about IOTA, therefore, is a plausible vision, which is executed by a highly dedicated team.

The given points lead to the conclusion that this is the most ambitious project in this sphere today where the incredible momentum will make a difference. It won’t take long before cryptoland will be the forgotten birthplace of IOTA.

@TechCrunch Would love that for the cryptospace, together with a standard they had to accept like using primary sources, commentaries have to be marked as such and conflicts of interests should be marked at the beginning of an article. Crypto desperately needs a standard. #iota #btc #eth